Our story
A small kitchen, six flavours, and a stubborn preference for doing it slowly
Wren & Whim is a two-person candy workshop on Huntington Avenue in Minneapolis. We make hard candy the way it was made before machines got good at faking it, and we keep the menu short on purpose.
Where it started
The first batch was not for sale.
In the winter of 2016 I was between jobs and cooking sugar in a rented commercial kitchen on the east side of Minneapolis, mostly to have something to do with my hands. Hard candy is a good hobby for a cold climate: it demands your full attention for about forty minutes and then it is done. I gave most of it away in paper bags with the flavour written on the front in pencil.
People started asking for particular ones. Not the prettiest ones — the strange ones. A batch where the black currant had gone almost black at the edges. A honey candy cooked a shade too dark. That was the first hint that the interesting work was not in making candy look cheerful, but in making it taste like something you had not had before.
We opened the workshop on Huntington Avenue in 2018 with two marble slabs, one tempering lamp and a menu of four. It is six now. It has never been more than six.
The name
Why Wren & Whim.
A wren is a small, loud, extremely serious bird that builds several nests and then picks one. A whim is what usually gets us into the kitchen at seven in the morning with an idea about fennel. The shop is named after both, and after the fact that neither of us could agree on anything more dignified.
It also keeps us honest about scale. We are not trying to be a candy company with a factory and a mascot. We are two people and a very good thermometer.
How we work
Three rules we do not bend.
- Rule oneWe cook in batches of forty or fewer, so we can watch the sugar the whole way through.
- Rule twoWe do not put anything on the counter that we would not eat ourselves, which has cost us two whole batches this year.
- Rule threeIf we cannot make your date or your quantity properly, we tell you before you order instead of after.
The people
Who is actually in the kitchen.
Mara Whitlock — candy maker
Cooks, colours, pulls and cuts. Came to candy from a decade of bread baking, which is why she talks about sugar the way other people talk about dough: temperature, feel, and the sound it makes when it is ready. Designs most of the colour work, including the spiral in Copper Comet.
Ellis Rademacher — shop & orders
Answers the emails, plans the batch schedule, wraps and ships. Also the person who will gently talk you out of ordering two hundred lollipops for a Saturday when the kitchen can honestly do eighty. Keeps the flavour notes, which is why they read like someone actually tasting something.
“We are not trying to make candy that looks like a cartoon. We are trying to make candy that makes you stop talking for a second.”
Mara WhitlockThe neighbourhood
Huntington Ave, and why we stayed.
The workshop sits in a low brick building a few blocks off the parkway, with a wide window that lets in the kind of grey winter light that makes amber candy look its best. There is a hardware store on the corner that has been there longer than either of us has been alive, and a bakery that lets us borrow their scale when ours dies.
People come in for a bag of something small, or to ask whether we can make a colour for a wedding, or to tell us that the honey candy tastes like their grandmother's kitchen. That last one happens more often than you would guess, and it is the reason we keep making The Quiet Bee even though it is the least photogenic thing in the shop.
What we do not claim
We are a small shop, not a laboratory. We make no health claims about our candy, no promises about how long a batch will last on your shelf, and no claims about awards we have not won. We make candy carefully and we describe it plainly — that is the whole offer.
Visiting
You are welcome to come by during opening hours and watch if the slab is out. Weekday mornings are the best time to see the actual cooking; weekends are busier and mostly wrapping. Hours and directions are on the contact page.
Next batch
Tell us what you would like us to make.
We take requests by email rather than through a shopping cart, because every batch is planned by hand. Send us a note and we will confirm flavours, quantity, price and a pick-up or shipping date.